Lucifer and Ahriman

Schmidt Number: S-3901

On-line since: 31st January, 2010

V

Dornach, 9th November, 1919

I want to speak
to-day of something that will help to deepen our
understanding of truths that must now be given to mankind by
Anthroposophy. We have often spoken of the two poles of
forces in man: the pole of will and the pole of intelligence.
To understand the nature of man we must be constantly mindful
of these two poles.

Man is a being
of will and a being of intelligence. Between them — at
any rate from birth until death — lies the element of
feeling, constituting the bridge between the intelligence and
the will. You know that these forces separate from each other
in a certain sense when man reaches what is called the
Threshold of the Spiritual World.

Our study
to-day will be concerned more particularly with the
relationship in which man stands to the surrounding world, on
the one side as a being of intelligence and on the other as a
being of will. We shall deal with the latter first.

In his life
between birth and death, man unfolds the force of will as the
impulse of his actions and activity. As it comes to
expression through the human organism, this force of will is
a very intricate, complicated matter. Nevertheless in one
aspect, everything of the nature of will in man bears a great
likeness, amounting almost to identity, with certain forces
of nature. It is therefore quite correct to speak of an inner
relation between the forces of will in the human being and
the forces of nature.

You know from
earlier studies that even while man is awake, he is in a
condition resembling sleep wherever his will is involved.
True, he has in his consciousness the ideas lying behind what
he wills, but how a particular idea takes effect in
the form of will — of that he knows nothing. He does
not know how the idea, “I move my arm”, is
connected with the process leading to the actual movement of
the arm. This process lies entirely in the subconsciousness
and it may truly be said that man is no more conscious of the
real process of will than he is of what takes place during
sleep. But when the question arises as to the connection of
man's will with the surrounding world, we come to something
that will strike the kind of consciousness that has developed
in the course of the last three to five centuries as highly
paradoxical. It is generally thought that the evolution of
the earth would be the same even if human beings had no part
in it at all. A typical natural scientist describes the
evolution of the earth as a series, let us say, of
geological, purely physical processes. And even if he does
not expressly say so, he has in mind that from the earth's
beginning until its hypothetical end, everything would go on
just the same even if it were uninhabited by human beings.
Why is this view held by natural science to-day? The reason is
that when anything takes place, for example in the mineral
kingdom, or the plant kingdom, let us say on November 9th,
1919, people believe that its cause lies in what has happened
in the mineral kingdom prior to this particular point of
time. Men think: the mineral kingdom takes its course and
what happens at any point is the effect of what went before;
the mineral effect is due to a mineral cause.

This is the way
men think and you will find evidence of it in any text-book
of geology. Conditions obtaining at the present time are said
to be the effects of the Ice Age, or of some preceding epoch
— but the causes are attributed entirely to what once
took place in the mineral kingdom as such; the fact that man
inhabits the earth is ignored. The belief is that even were
man not present, everything would run a similar course, that
the external reality would be the same — although, in
fact, man has always been part of this external reality. The
truth is that the earth is one whole, man himself being one
of the active factors in the earth's evolution. — I
will give you an example.

You know that
our present epoch — thinking of it for the moment in
the wider sense, as comprising the period since the great
Atlantean catastrophe — was preceded by the Atlantean
epoch itself, when the continents of Europe, Africa and
America in their present form were not in existence. At that
time there was one main continent on the earth — Atlantis
as it is called — extending over the area that is now
the Atlantic Ocean. You know too that at a certain period in
this Atlantean evolution, immorality of a particular kind was
rampant throughout the then civilised world. Human beings had
far greater power over the forces of nature than they later
possessed and employed these forces for evil purposes. Thus
we can look back to an age of widespread immorality. And then
came the great Atlantean catastrophe. The orthodox geologist
will naturally trace this catastrophe to processes in the
mineral kingdom; indeed it is a fact that one part of the
earth subsided and another arose. But it will not occur to
those who base their thinking on the principles of modern
natural science to say to themselves that the deeds and
activities of men were among the contributory causes. —
Yet so it is. — In very truth the Atlantean catastrophe
was the outcome of the deeds of men on the earth.

Outer, mineral
causes are not alone responsible for these great catastrophic
events that break in upon earth-existence. We must look for
causes lying within the sphere of human actions and impulses.
Man himself belongs to the chain of causative forces in
earth-existence. Nor does this apply only to events of such
magnitude but to what is happening all the time. Only the
connection between what goes on within man and cosmic
happenings which take effect in tellurian events, remains
hidden, to begin with. In this respect the whole of our
natural science amounts to a great, all-embracing illusion.
For if you want to get at the real causes you will not
discover them by studying the mineral, plant and animal
kingdoms alone.

Let me give you
the following illustration of what comes into consideration
here. We will approach it, so to speak, from the opposite
side. — Here (X) is the centre of the earth. —
When something takes place in the mineral kingdom, the plant
kingdom or the animal kingdom, it is a matter of seeking the
causes. The causes lie at certain points which are to be
found everywhere. You can picture what I mean by thinking of
the following. — In the region around Naples in Italy,
you will find that the earth over a wide area will emit
vapour if you take a piece of paper and set it alight.
Vapours begin to rise from the ground beneath you. You will
say: the force which drives up the vapours lies in the
physical process generated by the lighting of the paper. In
this case, the physical process is that by lighting the paper
you rarify the air and because of the rarification of the air
the vapours inside the earth press upwards. They are kept
down by the normal air-pressure and this is diminished by
setting light to the paper. If I merely want to give an
example of effects of a purely mineral nature — such as
these vapours arising out of the earth — I could say
for the sake of illustration that here, and here (points in
the diagram), a piece of paper is set alight. This shows you
that the causes of the rising of the vapour do not lie below
the soil, but above it. Now these points in the
diagram — a, b, c, d,
e, f do not represent pieces of paper that
have been set alight; in this instance they represent
something different. Imagine, to begin with, that each point
on its own has no significance but that the significance lies
in the system of points as a whole. — Do not
think now of the pieces of lighted paper, but of something
else which at the moment I will not specify. Something else
is there as an active cause, above the surface of the earth;
and these different causes do not work singly, but together.
And now imagine that there are not six points only, but, let
us say 1,500 million points
[Note 1]
all working together, producing a combined effect. These
1,500 million points are actually there. Each of you has
within you what may be called the centre of gravity of your
own physical structure. When man is awake, this centre of
gravity lies just below the diaphragm; when he is asleep it
lies a little lower. There are therefore some 1,500 million
of these centres of gravity spread over the earth, producing
a combined effect. And what issues from this combined effect
is the actual cause of a great deal of what takes place in
the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms on the earth. It is a
scientific fallacy to trace back to mineral causes the forces
manifesting in air and water and in the mineral realm; in
reality the causes are to be found within man.

This is a truth
of which there is scarcely an inkling to-day. It is known to
very, very few that the causes of processes active in the
mineral, plant and animal kingdoms lie within the organism of
man. (This does not apply to all the forces working
in these kingdoms of nature, but to a large proportion of
them.) Within mankind lie the causes for what happens on
earth. Therefore mineralogy, botany, zoology, cannot be
cultivated truly without anthropology — without the
study of man. Science tells us of physical, chemical and
mechanical forces. These forces are intimately connected with
the human will, with the force of human will that is
concentrated in man's centre of gravity. If we speak of
the earth with an eye to the truth of these matters, we must
not follow the geologists in speaking of an earth in the
abstract, but humanity must be accounted an integral part of
the earth. These are the truths that reveal themselves on
yonder side of the Threshold. Everything that can be known on
this side of the Threshold belongs to the realm of the
illusions of knowledge, not to the realm of truth.

At this point
the question arises: What relation is there between the
forces of will that are concentrated in man's centre of
gravity, and the external, physical and chemical forces?
— We are speaking, remember, of present-day humanity.
— In normal life, this relation takes effect in the
metabolic processes. When man takes into himself the
substances of the outer world, it is his will that actually
digests and works upon these substances. And if nothing else
were in operation, then what is taken into the organism from
outside would simply be destroyed. The human will has the
power to dissolve and destroy all extraneous substances and
forces; and the relation between man and the mineral, plant
and animal kingdoms of nature to-day is such that his will is
connected with the forces of dissolution and destruction
inherent in our planet.

We could not
live were this destruction not to take place — but for
all that it is destruction. This must never be forgotten. And
what are often described as unlawful magical practices are
based essentially on the fact that certain human beings learn
to employ their will wrongfully, in such a way that they do
not confine the destructive forces to their normal operations
within the organism but extend them over other human beings,
deliberately and consciously applying the forces of
destruction that are anchored in their will. That, quite
obviously, is a practice that is never, under any
circumstances, permissible.

Through our
will we are connected with the earth's forces of decline. And
if as human beings had only our forces of will, the earth
would be condemned through us, through mankind, to sheer
destruction. The prospect of the future would then be far
from inspiring; it would be a vista of the gradual
dissolution of the earth and its ultimate dispersal in cosmic
space. — So much for the one pole in man's
constitution.

But man is a
twofold being. One pole is, as we have seen, connected with
the destructive forces of our planet; the other pole —
that of intelligence — is connected with the will by
the bridge of feeling. But in his waking life, man's
intelligence is of little account as far as the planet earth
is concerned. During waking life we cannot really establish a
true relationship to earth-existence through our
intelligence. What I have told you in regard to the will
happens while man is awake, although he is not conscious of
it. If you see a rock crumbling away and ask where the actual
causes of the crumbling lie, then you must look into the
inner, organic nature of man himself. Strange as this will
seem to the modern mind, it is indeed so. But as I said, the
earth would face a sorry future if the other pole of man's
nature were not there — the pole of the upbuilding
forces. Just as the causes of all destruction lie in the will
that is concentrated in man's centre of gravity, so the
upbuilding forces lie in the sphere into which men pass
during their sleep. From the time of falling asleep until
that of waking, man is in a condition figuratively described
by saying that with his “I” and astral body he is
outside the physical body. But then he is entirely a being of
soul-and-spirit, unfolding the forces that are in operation
between falling asleep and waking. During this time he is
connected, through these forces, with everything that builds
up the earth-planet, everything that adds to the forces of
destruction the constructive, upbuilding forces. If you did
not go about the earth, the destructive forces actually
proceeding from your will would not be working in the
mineral, plant and animal kingdoms. If you never went to
sleep, the forces whereby the earth is continually upbuilt
would not stream out of your intelligence. The constructive,
upbuilding forces of the planet earth also lie in humanity
itself: I do not say: in the individual human being
— for I have expressly said that all these single
causes form a collective whole. The upbuilding forces lie in
mankind as a whole, actually in the pole of intelligence in
man's being but not in his waking intelligence. Waking
intelligence is really like a lifeless entity thrusting
itself into earth-evolution. The intelligence that works,
unconsciously to man, during his sleep — that is what
builds up the earth-planet. By this I am only trying to
explain that it is a fallacy to look outside the human being
for the destructive and the constructive forces of our earth;
you must look for them within the human being. Once
you grasp this, what I am now going to say will not be
unintelligible.

You look up to
the stars, saying that something is streaming from them that
can be perceived by man's sense-organs here on
earth. — But what you behold when you gaze at the stars
is not of the same nature as what you perceive on the earth
in the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms. In reality it
proceeds from beings of intelligence and will whose
life is bound up with those stars. The effects appear to be
physical because the stars are at a distance. They are not in
reality physical at all. What you actually see are the inter
activities of beings of will and intelligence in the stars. I
have already spoken to you of the ingenious description of
the sun given by astrophysicists. But if it were possible to
journey to the sun by some means of transport invented by a
Jules Verne, it would be found with amazement that nothing of
what was to be expected from these physical descriptions
exists. The descriptions are merely a composite picture of
solar phenomena. What we see is in reality the working of
will and intelligence which at a distance appears as
light. If an inhabitant of the Moon — supposing in
this sense there were such a being — were to look at the
earth, he would not detect its grassy or mineral surfaces but
— also perceiving it as a light effect or something
similar — he would detect what takes place around the
centres of gravity of human bodies and also the effects of
the conditions in which man lives between going to sleep and
waking. That is what would actually be seen from the
universe. Even the most perfect instrument would not enable
the chairs, for instance, on which you are now sitting, to be
seen; what would be seen is all that is taking place in the
region of your centres of gravity and what would happen if
you were suddenly to fall asleep — it is to be hoped
that this would not happen in every case! But wherever it did
happen, it would be perceived out in the universe.

So that to the
outer universe, what takes place through human
beings is the perceptible reality — not what
surrounds man in earthly existence. A very common saying is
that everything perceived with the senses is maya — the
great illusion — no reality but simply appearance. Such
an abstraction is of little account. It has meaning only when
one enters into the concrete, as we have now been doing. To
say glibly that the animal, plant and mineral worlds are maya
means nothing. What is of value is the realisation
that what you perceive outwardly depends fundamentally upon
yourselves and that — not of course at each moment but
in the course of mankind's evolution — you make
yourselves an integral part of the chain of causes and
effects.

Even when such
a shattering truth is uttered — and I think it may well
be shattering — it is not always seen in the aspect
where it becomes of importance in life. Such a truth assumes
importance only when we perceive its consequences. We are not
physical beings only; we are moral — or maybe immoral
— beings in earthly existence. What we do is determined
by impulses of a moral nature.

Now just think
with what bitter doubt modern thought is assailed in this
domain. — Natural science provides a knowledge of the
earthly that is confined to the connection between purely
external causes and effects; and in this cycle of natural
causes and effects, physical man too is involved. So it is
alleged by external, abstract science which takes account of
one aspect only of earthly existence.

The fact that
moral impulses also light up in man is admitted but nothing
is known about the connection between these moral impulses
and what comes to pass in the round of external nature.
Indeed the dilemma of modern philosophy is that the
philosophers hear on the one hand from the scientists that
everything is involved in a chain of natural causes and
effects — and on the other hand have to admit that
moral impulses light up in man. That is the reason why Kant
wrote two “Critiques”: the
Critique of Pure Reason,
concerned with the relation of man to a purely natural course
of things, and the
Critique of Practical Reason
where he puts forward his moral postulates — which in
truth — if I may speak figuratively — hover in
the air, come out of the blue and have no a priori
relation with natural causes.

As long as man
believes that what takes place in the external manifestations
of nature can be traced only to similar manifestations, as
long as he clings to this illusion, the intervention of moral
impulses is something that remains separate and apart from
the course of nature. Nearly everything that is discussed
to-day lies under the shadow of this breach. In their
thinking men cannot fuse the earthly round as such with the
moral life of humanity. But as soon as you grasp something of
what I have tried briefly to outline, you will be able to
say: Yes, as man I am a unity, and moral impulses are alive
within me. They live in what I am as a physical being. But as
a physical human being I am fundamentally the cause —
together with all mankind — of every physical
happening. — The moral conduct and achievements of
human beings on the earth are the real causes of what comes
to pass in the course of earth-existence.

Natural history
and natural science describe the earth in the way we find in
text-books of geology, botany and so forth. What is said
there seems entirely satisfactory according to the premises
formed through modern education. But let us suppose that an
inhabitant of Mars were to come down to the earth and observe
it in the light of his premises. — I am not
saying that such a thing could happen but merely trying to
illustrate what I mean. — Suppose a being from Mars,
having wandered dumbly about the earth were then to learn
some human language, read some geology and thus discover what
kind of ideas prevail concerning the processes and happenings
on the earth. — He would say: But that is not
all. By far the most important factor is ignored.
For example, I have noticed crowds of students loitering
about in their beer-houses, drinking and indulging their
passions. Something is happening there: the human will is
working in the metabolism. These are processes of which no
mention is made in your books on physics and geology; they
contain no reference to the fact that the course of
earth-existence is also affected by whether the students
drink or do not drink. — ... That is what a being not
entirely immersed in earthly ideas and prejudices would find
lacking in the descriptions given by man himself of
happenings on earth. For a being from Mars there would be no
question but that moral impulses, pervading human deeds and
the whole of human life, are part and parcel of the course of
nature. According to modern preconceptions there is something
inexorable in the play of nature, indeed pleasantly
inexorable for materialistic thinkers. They imagine that the
earth's course would be exactly the same were no human beings
in existence; that whether they behave decently or not makes
no fundamental difference or really alters anything. But that
is not the case! The all-essential causes of what happens on
the earth do not lie outside man; they lie within
mankind. And if earthly consciousness is to expand to
cosmic consciousness, humanity must realise that the earth
— not over short but over long stretches of time
— is made in its own likeness, in the likeness of
humanity itself. There is no better means of lulling man to
sleep than to impress upon him that he has no share in the
course taken by earth-existence. This narrows down human
responsibility to the single individual, the single
personality.

The
truth is that the responsibility for the course of
earth-existence through ages of cosmic time, lies with
humanity. Everyone must feel himself to be a member of
humanity, the earth itself being the body for that
humanity.

An individual
may say to himself: For ten years I have given way to my
passions, indulged my fancies and have thereby ruined my
body. — With equal conviction he should be able to say:
If earthly humanity follows impure moral impulses, then the
body of the earth will be different from what it would be
were the moral impulses pure. — The day-fly, because it
lives for twenty-four hours only, has a view of the world
differing entirely from that of man. The range of man's
vision is not wide enough to perceive that what happens
externally in the course of nature is not dependent upon
purely natural causes. In regard to the present configuration
of Europe, it is far more important to ask what manner of
life prevailed among human beings in the civilised world two
thousand years ago than to investigate the external mineral
and plant structure of the earth. The destiny of our physical
earth-planet in another two thousand years will not depend
upon the present constitution of our mineral world, but upon
what we do and allow to be done. With world-consciousness,
human responsibility widens into world-responsibility. With
such consciousness we feel as we look up to the starry
heavens that we are responsible to this cosmic expanse,
permeated and pervaded as it is by spirit — that we are
responsible to this world for how we conduct the earth. We
grow together with the cosmos in concrete reality when behind
the phenomena we seek for the truth.

I so often tell
you that we must learn to perceive the concrete realities of
things for the most part taught as abstractions to-day.
Nothing much is accomplished by adopting oriental traditions
such as: the external world of the senses is maya. We must go
much deeper if we are to arrive at the truth. Such
abstractions do not carry us far, because in the form in
which they have been handed down they are nothing but the
sediment of a primeval wisdom that did not hover
in abstractions but teemed with concrete realities which
must be brought to light again through spiritual intuition
and research. When you read in oriental literature of maya
and of truth as its antithesis,do not imagine that what you
read there to-day can be really intelligible to you. It is
only a much later compilation of matters that were concrete
realities to the ancient wisdom. We must get back to these
concrete realities. Men think to-day that they have some
understanding of cosmic processes when they assert that the
external world of sense is maya. — But nothing can be
understood unless one presses on to the underlying realities.
The moment it is realised: we have not to ask how the present
mineral world has developed out of the mineral processes of
another age; we have rather to ask about what has been going
on in mankind — at that moment the real meaning of the
saying, “the outer world is maya”, becomes clear.
Then we begin to perceive in man a reality far greater than
is usually perceived. — And then the feeling of
responsibility for earth-existence begins.

If you will try
to get to the inner core of these things — and it must
be by inward contemplation, not by means of the kind of
intelligence employed in natural science — you will
gradually find your way to the realisation that mankind is
composed of free human beings. Nature does not, in
truth, counteract our freedom, for as human beings we
ourselves fashion the nature immediately surrounding us. It
is only in its partial manifestations that nature counteracts
our freedom. Nature counteracts our freedom to an extent no
greater than if — to give an example — you are
stretching out your hand and someone else takes hold of it
and checks the movement. You will not deny freedom of will
simply because someone else checks a movement. As men of the
present day we are checked in many respects because of some
action of our predecessors that is only now taking effect.
But at all events it was an action of men. —
What men? Not anyone against whom we can turn with reproach,
for we ourselves were the men who, in earlier earthly lives,
brought about the conditions obtaining to-day.

We must not
confine ourselves to the mere mention of repeated earthly
lives but think of the connection between them in such a way
that even in external nature we perceive the effects of
causes we ourselves laid down in earlier lives. Naturally, in
reference to the single, individual human being, we must
speak of contributory causes only, for in all these things,
as I have said, it is a matter of the collective interworking
of men on the earth. No one should, for that reason, exclude
himself as an individual, for each of us has his share in
what is brought about by humanity as a whole and then comes
to expression in what constitutes the body for the whole of
earthly humanity in its onflowing life.

I have been
endeavouring to give you an idea of how a spiritual scientist
must regard the statements made in ordinary scientific
text-books. — Suppose I were to draw a series of
figures:

And now suppose some creature who had
never lived in the world of men were to crawl out of the
earth and, having some rudiments of arithmetical knowledge
were to look at the figures and say: First figure, second
figure, third figure. The third is the effect of the second
and the second the effect of the first. Effect of the first
figure — a triangle; effect of the second — a
circle. — This creature would then be combining cause
and effect. But it would be a fallacy, for I have drawn each
figure separately. In reality the one is independent of the
other. It only appears to be dependent to this
creature who associates what comes first with what follows,
as if the one were the outcome of the other. This,
approximately, is how the geologist describes the process of
the earth: Diluvial epoch, Tertiary epoch, Quarternary epoch,
and so on. But this is no more true than the statement that
the circle is the outcome, the effect of the triangle, or the
triangle the effect of the rectangular figure. The
configurations of the earth are brought about autonomously
— through the deeds of earthly humanity, including the
mysterious workings of the intelligence during the periods of
sleep when man is outside his physical body.

This shows you
that the descriptions given by external science are very
largely illusion — maya. But merely to speak about maya
is of little account. To the assertion that the external
world is maya we must be able to reply by stating where the
actual causes lie. These causes are hidden to a great extent
from man's powers of cognition. The part played by mankind in
shaping earth-existence cannot be fathomed by means of
external science but only by an inner science. My book
Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment
speaks of man's inner activity between the time of going to
sleep and waking. This can be revealed by knowledge that
reaches down to the sphere of the will. Man knows
nothing of the connection between the will and the outer
world for the processes of the will are hidden and concealed.
He does not know what is really going on when by lifting his
hand he sets in operation a process of will; nor does he know
that this process continues and has an effect in the whole
course of earth-existence.

This is
indicated in the scene in my Mystery Play,
The Portal of Initiation,
where the actions of Capesius and Strader
have their outcome in cosmic manifestations — in
thunder and lightning. It is, of course, a pictorial
representation, but the picture contains a deeper truth; it
is not phantasy but actual truth. For a fairly long period in
evolution, truths of this kind have been voiced only by true
poets whose phantasy must always be perception of
super-sensible processes.

This is very
little understood by modern man who likes to relegate poetry,
indeed all art, to a place separate and apart from external
reality. He feels relieved not to be asked to see in poetry
anything more than phantasy. True poetry, true art, is of
course, no more than a reflection of super-sensible truth
— but a reflection it is. Even if the poet is not
himself conscious of the super-sensible happenings, if his
soul is linked with the cosmos, if he has not been torn away
from the cosmos by materialistic education, he gives
utterances to super-sensible truths, in spite of having to
express them in pictures drawn from the world of sense.

Many examples
of this are contained in the second part of Goethe's
Faust,
where as I have shown in the case of particular passages,
the imagery has a direct relation with super-sensible processes.
[Note 2]
The development of art in recent centuries affords evidence of
what I have been saying. — Take any picture painted by
no means very long ago, and you will find that as a rule,
landscape is given very secondary importance. The painting of
landscape has come into prominence only since the last three
to five centuries. Earlier than that you will find that
landscape takes second place; it is the world of man
that is brought to the forefront because the consciousness
still survived that in regard to objective processes of
earth-existence the world of man is much more important than
the landscape — which is but the effect of the world of
man. In the very birth of preference for landscape there
lies, in the sphere of art, the parallel phenomenon of the
birth of the materialistic trend of mind — consisting
in the belief that landscape and what it represents has an
existence of its own, entirely apart from man. But the truth
is quite the reverse. Were some inhabitant of Mars to come
down to the earth he would certainly be able to see meaning
in Leonardo da Vinci's “Last Supper”, but not in
paintings of landscapes. He would see landscapes —
including painted landscapes — and the whole
configuration of the earth quite differently and with his
particular organ of sense could not fathom their meaning.
— Please remember that I am saying these things merely
in order to illustrate hypothetically what I want to
convey.

So you see, the
saying: “the external world is maya” cannot be
fully understood without entering into the concrete
realities. But to do this we must relate ourselves intimately
with earth-existence as a whole, know ourselves to be an
integral part of it. And then we must grasp the thought that
there can be external and apparent realities which are not
the truth, not the true realities. If you have a rose in your
room, it is an apparent reality only, for the rose as it is
in front of you there, cannot be the reality. It can be true
reality only while it is growing on the rose-tree, united
with the roots which in turn are united with the earth. The
earth as described by the geologists is as little a true
reality as a plucked rose is a reality.

Spiritual
science endeavours never to halt at the untrue reality, but
always to seek what must be added, in order to have the
whole, true reality. The meagre sense of reality
prevailing in our present civilisation expresses itself in
the very fact that every external manifestation is taken as
reality. But there is reality only in what lies before one as
an integrated whole. The earth by itself, without man, is no
more a true reality than the rose plucked from the rose-tree.
— These things must be pondered and worked upon; they
must not remain theories but pass over into our feelings. We
must feel ourselves members of the whole earth. It is of
importance again and again to call up the thought: this
finger on my hand has true reality only as long as it is part
of my organism; if it is cut off it no longer has true
reality. — Similarly, man has no true reality apart
from the earth, nor has the earth without mankind. It is an
unreal concept when the modern scientific investigator
thinks, according to his premises, that earth-evolution would
run the same course if humanity were not there. I recently
showed you that it would not be so, by telling you that the
bodies laid aside by human beings at death become a leaven in
earth-evolution and that if no human bodies — either by
burial or cremation — became part of the earth, the
whole course of physical happenings would be other than it is
in consequence of these bodies having been received into the
earth.

In the lecture
to-day I wanted to speak in greater detail of the connection
between the two poles of will and intelligence in man and his
cosmic environment.

Notes:

Note 1.
Representing, approximately, the total population of the earth.

Note 2.
Twenty-eight lectures given in the year 1915.
Geisteswissenschaftliche Erläuterungen zu
Goethe's Faust.
[This is a reference to GA#'s 272 and 273:
Spiritual Scientific Note on Goethe's Faust,
Volumes I (15 lectures) and II (13 lectures), most of
which are yet untranslated. – e.Ed.]